Honeymoon

Matthew Harman

The wrap around Siva’s head loosens slightly with each step into the bicycle pedal, his weight shifting with the movement. Slowly, the wrenched groan of rusted chain. His body rises and falls and the sun is so intense that my wife crouches away from me into the shadowed corner of our rickshaw seat. I am also hot, sweltering hot, hut this is a splendid moment and I do not care about the sun burning me red. Siva’s sweat shows through the back of his gray T–shirt. Sometimes he allows the rickshaw to coast so he can tighten the loosening cloth, never letting go of the song he is singing to himself. It is a popular Hindi song I’ve heard on the radio.
    I don’t think I’m delirious, certainly, though it is difficult to see. Your eyes burn from the haze and dust and your own sweat if they are kept open too long. The heat is killing people and animals. We saw an old woman lying on the street in New Delhi, her dark body cooking anonymously at our feet. We had just arrived, hadn’t slept for two days, airport to airport. Walking past, shoving through the panting crowds, Caroline clutching a handful of my shirt, I just wondered when someone would pick up the body. We were hungry and ready to die. Bananas, I was thinking. Here in tiny Pun we are on the coast, and the heat unfolds itself tenderly, more a dreamy revelation than an execution.
    Siva can’t read, and when I tell him that the newspaper says this is the hottest summer in India for twenty years, he laughs. His eyes are bloodshot a demonic red. He pedals, he sweats. We are in a rhythm, the three of us— Siva pumping, Caroline limp and rocking with the bicycle’s movement, and me leaning on the front seat, still a little stoned from Siva’s bhang and feeling the sun and air take turns on my back. The chain clangs against the frame of the bicycle, its sound traveling with us down the quiet road.
    I can’t hear the ocean yet, but when I close my eyes I think I can smell it. Brine, free–floating seaweed, rotting fish. Rare clean air.
    When the bike stops with a jerk I open my eyes. A near–naked Parajan fisherman is standing next to Siva, pointing to us, talking wildly. Squinting, I look over his dark body, his uncombed hair, his loincloth. Cradled in his right arm is a small, quaking rabbit. The Parajan does not speak much of Siva’s language. He points to the forest brush behind him, a few yards to the side of the dirt road, and repeats himself carefully. Siva drops his smile; Caroline is still asleep.
    “Vhat is it?” I ask.
    Siva lifts his arms, makes his hands claws, growls. “Big animal,” he says. “Big, not safe.” He makes lumbering, crawling motions with his legs and arms, swings his face from side to side. I look to the tribal man and he dips his head to me.
    I am confused. I’d only been warned of venomous snakes. “Tiger?” I ask. Siva does not understand, tries more pantomime. He draws stripes on his back, shows his fangs. “Yes, tiger,” I say. “You know ‘tiger’? Big cat.”
    Siva nods furiously. “Yes,” he says, “big cat. Dangerous.”
    Siva says, “Ten rupees for safe.” I give it to him and he hands the money to the Parajan, who shoves the paper into his thong. Siva pedals and the rickshaw moves again.
    The man trots a few paces ahead of the bicycle, holding the rabbit Out at arm’s length. Slowly, I realize what the money is for. We are renting this malnourished pet; the man is offering to toss it into the path of the tiger if it should cross onto the road. Siva is not singing anymore. My wife, now awake, asks me what is happening. I tell her and she wordlessly lights a cigarette, almost as if it were a defense against tiger attack. Almost as if it were my fault.
    Forgetting the heat, I scan the tree line for furtive stripes and can’t help but smile, thinking of Caroline disdainfully blowing smoke into the eyes of a leaping, terrible tiger.

SOMETIMES WE FOUGHT in the evenings, usually after dinner and before sleep. This particular evening we didn’t. She was feeling ill again.
    “Why don’t you go out?” Caroline asked. “I’m no use.”
    I felt guilty pleasure; I wanted to suppress it. I knew where it came from and didn’t want to acknowledge the source. “What will you do?” I asked.
    “Finish my Agatha Christie, I suppose. I have another waiting for me. Maybe I’ll write postcards or something.” She looked up at me from the bed. “David. This is not a martyrdom. I don’t care what you do. I’ll be okay in a few days. Really.”
    I took a step to the door and heard her say, “Be careful, David.”
    “What do you mean?” I said, goading her.
    “Well, you know. . . just don’t get lost or anything. And don’t eat unwashed fruit.” I nodded, took another step. “Just be careful,” she said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
    So I left her with her Agatha Christie books. They were available everywhere in India, along with P. G. Wodehouse novels. The other mishmash of English–language writing one could find in railway book stalls fell far below these British superstars in both literary standing and moral decency. Caroline read it all but refused to pick up the generic three–volume guide to Hindu philosophy I was plowing through. I had bought the set on a whim in a secondhand shop in Agra, probably pawned by some hippie mid–pilgrimage. They were the westerners we most often encountered: confused and aged Americans and Australians lost in the continent, wandering and poor as any daalit, bumming cigarettes and then shuffling off into the crowds. I distrusted them immediately, hated their phony sincerity and the unapologetic way they slinked off with my Mariboros.
    So I left her. As I said before. When I returned later she would be asleep, dreaming of some polite murder, Madonna still playing in her headphones. Her face, her quiet.. . I would do things like kiss her forehead, stroke her hair. After washing my face and brushing my teeth with iodine water I would lift the mosquito net and lie down beside her, gently taking the headphones off her ears and placing them over my own, listening until the tape stopped, when I would slip away from the Indian evening and join her in dreams of faraway places not easily remembered.
SIVA WAS WAITING FOR ME when I left the hotel that night, lounging in the back seat of his rickshaw, high as always. We had become something like friends after a week at the hotel. He had taken me to his house the evening before to meet his eighteen–year–old wife and two naked children. We sat on cement blocks and smoked my cigarettes, the flies worse than I would have imagined. When we left, Siva ground the ashes into his dirt floor.
    As we traveled into town, strange clouds began moving inland from the ocean, high in the air and dark. Siva pointed to them as he pedaled, saying to me, “Big rains. Big rains coming in weeks.” I nodded to his back and imagined being here during monsoon. I couldn’t imagine not being here. Where else but in a tiny Indian coastal town could I invent myself nightly? Alone, at night, in the market places and drink stands, I had no clue who I was. Completely alone, completely a liar.
    “What we do tonight?” asked Siva.
    “I don’t know,” I said. A scabbed pariah dog ran up to us and Siva kicked it. All the evenings in Pun were like this, all delicious. And Caroline was sick again, and she was a liar too. But already I was forgetting that.

THE NEXT DAY we woke early and after a quiet breakfast went for a walk down the beach. I was still a little dazed from the evening before. I was wearing the shirt I had had tailored for me a few days earlier, a linen kurta, and plastic flip–flops from the market. They hurt my feet immensely. Caroline wore one of my old T–shirts. We were holding hands. As we walked we came upon a family of Bengali tourists who were wading in the ocean, the women lifting their saris just above the seawater. They turned to stare at us as we passed.
    “Did you have fun last night?” asked Caroline.
    “I guess so,” I said.
    “Are you getting to be friends with Siva or what?”
    “I guess you could say that.”
    “What’s with ‘I guess’?”
    “Did you finish your book?”
    “Yes. You’re hung over, aren’t you?” she asked. I couldn’t believe we still talked like this. So I nodded. Caroline said, “You must have fun without me. Discussing your newfound interest in Eastern philosophy or whatever bullshit it is you talk about.”
    “You said you didn’t mind if I went out.” I looked over the ocean. Some fishing boats were out in the distance.
    “Well?” she asked. “Do you have fun without me?”
    I stopped to pick up a shell. “I guess.”
    “What a fucking honeymoon,” said Caroline.
AMERICANS ARE SENTIMENTAL PEOPLE. Most are, anyway. Just look at the popularity of greeting cards, of the messages they offer for those who feel the need to say something. “To a very special MOTHER, whose love is like no OTHER.” We feel deeply, but we need help with the syntax.
    “Syn–tax?” asked someone.
    “Let me talk like this, please,” I said, just as a new bottle of beer was set down. “I never get to talk like this.” Siva and his friends looked at me curiously. I was far too drunk to get my point across. “What was my point?” I kept asking, “what was my point?”
    The drinks were on me. “This beer is very delicious,” said Siva’s friend Rama. Of the entire group, he could speak the most English and was the one to whom I directed much of my speech. He didn’t reply often. None of them did.
    We were sitting outside the Pink House, on the beach. We were close enough to the ocean to hear the waves lap the shore, although it was a dark night and we couldn’t see them. We had been at the market most of the evening, Siva and his friends and I, wandering and eating and insulting beautiful women. They explained things to me, like how beggars made more money than they did and when the best time was for mangoes. We smoked bhang from stone chillum pipes. We grazed at food stands, devouring somosas and masala dosas, steamed peanuts in newspaper cones, expensive chocolate bars from Bombay, and hacked coconut flesh. We drank beer and cooled bottles of Thums Up Cola.
    They asked me questions about America and I told them lies. Everyone drives a car. No one goes out without a gun. Big beef hamburgers with every meal. The stranger the question, the more outlandish the reply. When they asked me about my work, I told them that I was an artist. I told them that I sold paintings for thousands of dollars. They looked unsurprised. I told them that I wrote poems and songs and novels. I sang for them. Had I ever been a Fine Bedding, Inc. salesman? It was so hard to remember. I had forgotten already. I told them that I was in India researching a novel.
    “What kind of story?” asked Rama.
    I drew my finger over the lip of my glass. “A story of a man. A man on the run from bad people.”
    “Why bad people?” asked Siva.
    “Well, well,” I said. “An excellent question, Siva. One is a man he does not truly know but who has hurt him, unbelievably.” I looked up and everyone was bobbing their heads. “This is an evil, evil man. He is horrible, this piggy bastard.”
    “What is piggy bastard?” asked Rama.
    “It is a miscreant not to be trusted. A man with squatty legs and hairy arms who is so ugly women find him attractive. This is mainly because he has compensated for his piggishness and his animal mind with charm and tight jeans. Anyone can see he hates himself, of course. His easy humor is a tool he has sharpened to help educe pleasure from pain.”
    “And them other bad people?” asked Siva.
    “The other is the accomplice, and the victim, and the true villain. And she has betrayed the hero of our story, a fact he discovers just before a long trip to a faraway place. Our hero picks up a phone to call his mother and hears the accomplice whispering, ‘But I don’t want to see you. I’m serious this time. I’m married now and it’s over.’ Our shocked hero hangs up, but not before he hears the bad man’s voice pleading for one more go. He recognizes this bad man’s voice. It is the aforementioned evil pig.”
    There was silence for a moment. “Yes, life is a terrible suffering,” said Siva. I bought everyone a new beer and rubbed the threat of tears away with a sand–gritted wrist.
    “I suppose I’ll have to sell another painting if the book doesn’t work out,” I said, answering an unasked question. Rama drank thoughtfully; once again the sound of waves came to us. I noticed that the breeze from the sea was coating my glasses with a film of salt and I put them down.
    Rama said, “I do not know if I could be a painter or a writer. You are both. You must be a happy man.” I looked up at the dark sky.
    “I am,” I said, and suddenly it was nearly true.
    The men were mostly asleep, their bottles wrapped in their hands. Siva looked at us as if from a great distance. His eyes were glazed from beer and bhang. One finger brushed his mustache, the other held a cigarette. I felt the first faint pullings of exhaustion myself; my arms and feet seemed so heavy. At that moment I felt a stirring within which became my spirit, my spirit that began to rise out of me, expanding, absorbing this moment and these people, this time and place, this beach, this country. Ohio, futons, waterbeds—they were on the other side of the world, separated from me by unlivable deserts and more than one ocean.
    “David, why sad?” asked Siva, his voice faint.
    “I don’t know, Siva,” I replied. “Not sad, beautiful.”
    “Ahhh,” said Rama, smiling at me. “You need very much to see jungle beach. Very beautiful, very nice. Go soon, Siva can take you. It is not far from Pun, maybe five kilometers.” Rama waved his hand to the north.
    Siva leaned back and smiled. “Yes, jungle beach, David, you like. No people, very good. Jungle beach, yes.” Siva closed his eyes. “Tomorrow you talk to missus, we go.”
CAROLINE AND I WALKED FOREVER. Pun’s beach would win; we could never reach the end of it. It would circle back on us a year later and then we could keep walking, but it wouldn’t be the end. I tried to tell her this, but she ignored me. She wasn’t interested. She just wanted to walk and walk, to look for seashells and maybe a spot to sit down and read for a while. When she Iinally responded, it was to say, “India’s not an island. We’d end up in Burma.”
    I told her about the evening before—not my stories, but about the jungle beach. She said it sounded okay; we agreed to go later on in the day.
    Just then we crossed over the crest of a small dune and saw a group of people gathered ahead. Something long and gray was sprawled at their feet. A small fishing boat was pulled up to the shore, and a rut in the sand connected it to whatever the people were looking at. When we got close enough I could see that it was a dead hammerhead shark. Caroline stopped, but I walked up to the group.
    The shark was still bleeding from a tear in the side of its mouth. Blood also oozed from punctures in its back and white belly. I marveled at its tough leather hide. The shark’s bulging eyes stared off in opposite directions, fixed in their orbits. Speckles of sand were stuck to its wet eyeballs. Everyone gathered there was silent, except for a child who cried out when his mother tried to make him touch the corpse.
    “Caroline, come here,” I said loudly, “you’ve got to see this.”
    “No,” she said, “I can’t bear it.” I couldn’t turn away from the shark. I expected to see it flop and gasp to life at any moment. I thought of the bluegill I went fishing for back home, about the size of my hand. “David, come back here,” she said, a little louder. “Please, let’s go. We can go back now. Please.”
    The other people looked at me. “Hold on,” I said. “Let me see it a little more.” A near–naked man I assumed to be the fisherman was sitting beside the shark with his legs drawn up, resting. His gaze was set over the ocean. I wanted to offer him a cigarette.
    “Please!” she said, a little shrilly.
    I hated her. I left the shark.
    We followed our footprints back from where we had come. I picked up stones and skipped them off the water.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. I didn’t respond.
    “Really, I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you mad at me? What’s wrong?”
    I could think of nothing decent to say. I struggled, but nothing came. We walked more. Finally, then, “I can’t believe I sell waterbeds.”
    “What are you talking about?” she asked. “You’re a good salesman.”
    “I can’t believe you,” I said. The morning sun was baking me and I wanted to take a shower. I drank some water from my Bilseri bottle.
    “What’s wrong with you?” said Caroline, reaching out to take my hand. We held hands; we walked the beach.

WE ARRIVE AT, THE JUNGLE BEACH without seeing any tigers. The Parajan trots away with his rabbit, disappearing into the forest. Caroline says, “Surprise, surprise, no tiger.” She climbs down from the rickshaw and loops her backpack over her shoulder. When I touch the ground it is soft, fine sand.
    “It is beautiful,” she says. The sand is light gray along the beach line, and the ocean is on fire, brilliantly gleaming under the sun. “It looks like Florida,” says Caroline. I shake my head, although I’ve never been to Florida.
    We leave the rickshaw and the three of us move toward the beach. Immediately I notice four people in the distance, about a hundred yards down the shoreline. They walk along the water’s edge in single file. “They fisherman, no problems,” says Siva, following my gaze. We walk to the water and dip our feet into the Indian Ocean. The water is very warm, nearly body temperature.
    “Very nice,” says Siva, smiling, and takes off his T–shirt. Caroline lays out a lungi to lie on and sets her things down.
    Siva and I take turns drinking his palm toddy from a plastic water bottle. It is a harsh roadside batch. The alcohol is strong and rough and I feel it in my exhaled breath. Caroline does not want any; she is drinking water and makes me drink some, too, so I won’t dehydrate. I take off my shirt and shoes and then Siva and I are in the ocean, swimming away from shore. I have been warned about currents and a wicked undertow, but the ocean is calm and peaceful.
    Siva swims far out and I watch him go, disappearing with each swell of the water. I kick my legs just enough to float and lift my face to the sun. I am floating in the Bay of Bengal, I think. I don’t know where my feet end and the warm sea water begins. I am part of the Indian Ocean—it moves; my body moves with it. I float for minutes, hours, days. I don’t know. I don’t care. When a strand of seaweed brushes against my face I lazily put it in my mouth and taste it. Salty, bitter, alive. My body shrinks to nothing. I stay nothing for a long time.
    When I look up, back toward shore, it is a long way away. Caroline is on her feet and waving to me. She cups her hands to her mouth. I can’t hear her so I begin swimming in. It is a long, hard swim. My legs begin to ache; I realize I am working against the will of the ocean. I swim away from the current and then back to shore, concentrating on kicking, on stretching arms, on steady breathing.
    When my toes scrape against sand, it takes a moment to stop my limbs from their automatic labor. I stand and walk the rest of the way, my arms hanging limply at my side. Siva and Caroline are standing too, waiting for me.
    “You stupid idiot,” says my wife, “do you want to fucking die?” I stand in front of her, letting the water fall off me and into the sand.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, a little breathless. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
    We sit on the beach. Caroline is too angry to talk to me and sits reading her book. When I have my breath back, Siva and I smoke cigarettes and he points out how far I drifted. He thinks it is funny and slaps me on the back.
    “That’s nothing,” I tell Siva. “I grew up next to a lake. I could swim before I could walk.”
    “Interesting,” says Caroline from behind her book. “I thought I taught you to swim. The summer you turned fifteen.”
    Siva looks at me and I roll my head as if bored. Ignore her.
    The fishermen have stopped and are talking to one another down the beach. One of them, a child, strolls over to where we are sitting. He is maybe four years old. He points to Caroline and me while talking to Siva in a language I have never heard. The boy laughs and I smile at him. He holds out his hands, palms up, and I shrug my shoulders. “Sorry, nothing,” I say, pulling my pockets out to show him I am being honest. The boy cocks his head at me and then gives up.
    After the boy walks away, Siva says, “Let’s go now.”
    Caroline says, “Wait a minute. I’m almost done with this chapter.” Siva bobs his head and we wait for Caroline to finish.
    When we arrive at the rickshaw the Parajan fishermen have surrounded it. Five men. They look at us blankly while the young boy dances circles around them. One holds a coconut–splitting machete in his left hand. They speak in harsh tones to Siva, who replies haltingly and gruffly. “What is it?” I ask. Siva does not look away from the men but says, “Money.”
    “Oh, that,” I say. “Tell them I don’t have any.” Siva nods and says something to them. They look at me. One man takes a step forward.
    “Okay,” I say. “Caroline, do you have any money?”
    “Yes, but I’m not giving these assholes any.”
    “Maybe we’d better.”
    “They’re just assholes,” she says. “Let’s go. They won’t do anything.”
    I take a step toward the rickshaw, and the semicircle of men moves forward. They are smiling. “Oh God,” I say and turn out my pockets again. One of the men shouts at me. It is a terrible sound. Siva says, “These bad men.”
    The man with a machete raises his hand and strikes me hard across the face with the broad side of the blade. Caroline screams. I am stunned and fall to the ground. The little boy screams too, shrieking laughter. The other men fall in on me. They kick my face with their bare feet. They punch my hunched– over back and pull at my hair. They grunt from their straining. My shirt is torn from my body.
    Between blows the Parajans upbraid me in dark and awful intonations.
    Away from me, I can faintly hear Caroline howling, crying, hysterical. Siva roars at the men from a safe distance. I taste copper blood in my mouth, a loose tooth. It does not hurt much; I go numb fast.

IT HAS BEEN TEN DAYS; we are leaving Purl for Bhubaneshwar on the morning express. Tonight Caroline comes in late, after eating dinner in the hotel restaurant. She brings out a chocolate bar from a pocket and hands it to me.
    “I think I’m a changed man,” I say.
    “Well, you’ve always been a quick healer,” she says, taking her clothes off, slipping under the mosquito net. “Is that what you mean?”
    “You know what I mean,” I say. “You always know what I mean, you always have, ever since the beginning.”
    “Ever since I taught you to swim?” she asks.
    “Yes, ever since,” I say, and form a smile.
    “It actually seems you’ve been your old self lately,” she whispers, reaching under the sheet, running a hand tenderly up my thigh.
    “And what about you?” I want to ask, but instead I kiss her. To move my head only hurts a little now, a soft ache.
    “That’s just what I mean,” I murmur back, and suddenly, terrifyingly, the pain washes back over my chest, my spine, my eyes. I nearly go unconscious. I am strong enough, I say to myself. This is nothing to me.
    “Really?” she breathes into my ear.
    “Truly,” I say, forcing back a gasp. “Truly, really, honestly.”

Matthew Harman attended Indiana University and the Johns Hopkins Graduate Writing Seminars, where he was nominated for a Henfield Foundation Grant by Julian Barnes. He lives in Baltimore and is currently at work on a novel about lost love, the art of taxidermy, and techniques of private investigation. "Honeymoon" is his first published story.

“Honeymoon” appears in our Winter 1999 issue.